Rose Marie Hinchliffe Riddle traveled extensively after retiring from her 34-year career teaching science in Dallas. She traveled as she had taught: her way.

She always packed just 13 pounds of necessities so that she could travel unassisted. She stayed in youth hostels because “that’s where all the interesting people are.”

Riddle often played the harmonica to entertain the people she met. She visited the coast of Spain when she was 71, playing her harmonica in bars until the early hours of the day.

“She said she never had to buy a drink,” said her daughter, Joan Stys of Austin.

Riddle, 86, died Feb. 26 of natural causes at her home in Austin, where she had lived since 2011.

Services will be at 3 p.m. Friday at Triumphant Love Lutheran Church in Austin.

Riddle was born in Mexia, where she graduated from high school in 1944. She received a bachelor’s degree from Texas State College for Women, now Texas Woman’s University, in 1948, and earned a master’s degree from Southern Methodist University in 1970.

Riddle was certified to teach all grade levels and taught throughout the Dallas district, especially where she saw the need. Her assignments included teaching at Jefferson Davis Elementary, now Barbara Jordan Elementary, W.W. Bushman Elementary, Daniel Webster Elementary and Carter High School, where she taught chemistry and physics.

“She said, ‘Anybody could teach a smart kid; it was when you could teach the ones who were struggling that you could make a difference,’” her daughter recalled. “That’s when you knew you were a teacher.”

Riddle spoke up when she thought teachers weren’t given the materials to teach properly.

“I remember her stories about when she was first told to teach sex education — and all the limits they wanted to put on it,” her daughter said. “She said, ‘Well then, this isn’t what we are teaching.’”

Riddle brought in police officers with examples of illegal substances so that she and her fellow teachers could better understand how to teach a drug-prevention curriculum.

“Her line was all about experience, not just talking about it,” Stys said. “You had to see it, to touch it to know what it was about.”

Riddle retired in 1987 and began traveling and making friends with people she met in the hostels.

Stys recently found letters to her mother that she received from people she had made friends with around the world.

One said: “Meet me in Fiji. I recently graduated the University of Seoul and I’m going to be in Fiji on this date,” her daughter recalled. “And she would go.”

An avid swimmer, Riddle saved a man from drowning at an East Dallas pool when she was 75.

Riddle and some friends were having drinks after swimming when a man began to struggle in the pool.

“She jumped in and pulled him out and did CPR,” Stys said.

Riddle was hospitalized three times in her life: for the birth of her daughter, once when she was 80 and earlier this year, after a Valentine’s Day fall.

In addition to her daughter, Riddle is survived by her husband, Alfred Riddle of Austin; two sisters, Helen Finley of Dallas and Elizabeth Crockett of Temple; and two grandchildren.